The heart of Tom Winsor's 1,000-page review of police pay and conditions comes when he complains that, for too long, policing has been regarded as an intellectually undemanding occupation

He acknowledges that the roots of policing in Britain lie in a working-class culture, but complains that too many officers retain that mindset at a time when the modern challenges and tasks of crime-fighting require a professional response from people of the highest calibre, integrity and judgment.

Many of the 120-plus recommendations made by Winsor, a solicitor who was the government's former rail regulator, appear to be dedicated to the idea of creating a smaller but far more professional force where merit, rather than any "jobsworth" criteria, should determine pay and promotion.

In essence, he wants to make policing as attractive a career as the law, medicine or the City for the brightest and best graduates from the best universities. He complains that policing has long been left behind by other public sector jobs, such as nursing and teaching, which are now nearly all-graduate professions.

So he wants to see a minimum entrance requirement of three A-levels introduced and annual tests to ensure that all officers up to and including the rank of chief constable are literally fit for purpose.

Interestingly, the immediate response from Brian Paddick, the former Met deputy commissioner, was to warn that, if that the entrance requirement had been in force when he was younger, he would never have made it into the police. "Formal academic qualifications are not a good measure of suitability to be a police officer," Paddick said.

Winsor concedes that an Oxford graduate with first class honours in jurisprudence may make a materially worse officer than a man or woman who has not been to college but is able to deal with people and objectively assess a situation, "but it is also true that, other things being equal, the higher the intelligence of the average police officer, the more efficient and effective he is likely to be".

While most officers should be able to deal with the many criminals of "low or mediocre intelligence", they now also have to deal with the sophistication and complexity of serious and organised crime and cyber-criminals.

The counter-argument, however, must be that for the force to successfully police a community, it must be representative of the community it comes from. The image of the traditional skilled white working-class background of the police never really recovered from a Policy Studies Institute report in the mid-1980s which portrayed them as "racist, sexist, and drunk most of the time". The Leveson inquiry has underlined the need for a more ethical and sophisticated force.

But some critics of Winsor say that this "Plod" image is already 20 years out of date. It was true that, in 1959, only 1% of recruits were educated to A-level or above, but the latest figures show that 68% would now pass Winsor's minimum educational criteria and 30% are graduates.

The move to turn the police into a profession is also seen as coming with another agenda. Home secretary Theresa May's reform programme has already proposed introducing a professional institute of policing, and her wider changes emphasise that fully qualified and expensive warranted officers should be concentrated on the core tasks for which their skills are needed. If you are going to employ jurisprudence graduates from Oxford, then there is little point in them spending their time pounding the pavement for hours on end. Far better to have cheaper community support officers or even accredited private security patrolling a neighbourhood to reassure the public with a visible uniform presence.

The first part of Winsor's package, under which 40% of officers will be worse off, has already sparked widespread anger in the police. May now faces a more difficult decision on whether to press ahead with this more radical reform.